While more than 1,500 employees of Complexul Energetic Oltenia are to be fired on April 1, 2026, without social protection measures, under the pretext of lack of budget and restructuring constraints, the heads of the state-owned company have received substantial salary increases.
According to the information obtained by The Foundation For The Defense Of Citizens Against State Abuses from CE Oltenia, the company's directors received a 37% increase in salaries in 2026 compared to 2025. Specifically, they increased from 752,346 Lei NET as they received in 2025, to a value of 1,031,775 Lei NET in 2026.
The members of the Supervisory Board are not far behind either, with their remuneration increasing from 973,241 lei NET in 2025 to 1,048,236 lei in 2026. Thus the company has budgeted for 2026 total net remunerations of RON 2,080,011 for the members of the Management Board, 354,424 lei more than in 2025.
At the same time, the data analyzed by The Foundation For The Defense Of Citizens Against State Abuses shows that although the management of the state-owned company benefits from annual remunerations worth millions of lei, the company's profit has registered a significant decrease.
FACIAS points out that the budgetary effort to support and to restructure Complex Energetic Oltenia is considerable, especially as the company's financial results deteriorated sharply between 2018-2024. The company is surviving through a state aid scheme approved by the European Commission for the purchase of CO2 emission allowances totaling €1.09 billion. Between 2021-2025 the state budget supported Complex Energetic Oltenia with a total amount of 5.39 billion lei.
Official data show a collapse in CE Oltenia's net profit. From 3.5 billion lei in 2022 to 1 billion lei in 2023, and in 2024 it fell alarmingly to just 285 million lei, almost 12 times lower than in 2022. The situation was no better in 2018-2021 either, when the company recorded total losses of 4.45 million lei.
The accumulated turnover of the company between 2020-2024 was 20.3 billion lei, and the accumulated net profit for the same period was 2.37 billion lei. Relative to turnover, the state aid represents 26.5% and is more than twice the cumulative net profit for the five years analyzed.
More details about the case of Complex Energetic Oltenia S.A., as well as other extensive analysis of how public money is wasted by state-owned companies can be found in the volume "Irosirea banului public! Pierderile înregistrate de companiile cu capital de stat", published by FACIAS.